Touba and the Meaning of Night

Touba and the Meaning of Night introduces English-speaking readers to the masterpiece of a great contemporary Persian writer, renowned in her native Iran and much of Western Europe. This remarkable epic novel, begun during one of the author's several imprisonments, was published in Iran in 1989 to great critical acclaim and instant bestseller status--until Shahrnush Parsipur was again arrested a year later, and all her works banned by the Islamic Republic.

After her father's death, fourteen-year-old Touba proposes to a fifty-two-year-old relative in order to ensure her family's financial security. Intimidated by her outspoken nature, Touba's husband soon divorces her. She marries again, this time to a prince with whom she experiences tenderness and physical passion and has four children--but he proves unfaithful and unreliable. Touba is granted a divorce from him, and lives out the rest of her long life as matriarch to a changing household of family members and refugees.

From a distinctly Iranian viewpoint, Tuba and the Meaning of Night explores the ongoing tensions between rationalism and mysticism, tradition and modernity, male dominance and female will. Throughout, it defies Western stereotypes of Iranian women and Western expectations of literary form, speaking in an idiom that reflects both the unique creative voice of its author and an important tradition in Persian women's writing.

Born in Iran in 1946, Shahrnush Parsipur began her career as a fiction writer and producer at Iranian National Television and Radio. She was imprisoned for nearly five years by the Islamist government without being formally charged. Shortly after her release, she published Women Without Men and was arrested and jailed again, this time for her frank and defiant portrayal of women’s sexuality. While still banned in Iran, the novel became an underground bestseller there, and has been translated into many languages around the world. She is also the author of Touba and the Meaning of Night, among many other books, and now lives in exile in Northern California.